Blue ribbon panel: NorthPoint names software partners for back-office system

NorthPoint Communications pinned blue ribbons on its latest group of best-of-breed software providers last week when it announced the elements of a new back-office system.

In a continuous effort to streamline practices and ensure scalability, NorthPoint will go live early this quarter with new systems from Siebel Systems, Syndesis and Telcordia Technologies. Other new solutions that already have been implemented include Portal Software's Infranet solution for billing and customer care and Vitria's middleware solution for order management and interoperability between back-office systems.

Dubbed OSS2000 within NorthPoint, the quest for a next generation automated service delivery and support platform began by using Siebel as its customer interface for accepting and distributing orders to Syndesis and Telcordia solutions. Syndesis' NetProvision Architecture provides the internal mechanism that reserves and assigns resourceson the DSL access multiplexer while Telcordia's Exchange Link handles the external interconnection to the incumbent carriers.

"We expect [these vendors] to step up and deliver not just a quality product but a quality integration as part of a team," said Mike Parks, chief information officer at NorthPoint. Part of that integration contract has been awarded to PricewaterhouseCoopers, which is managing the order and customer care aspect of the project.

The best-of-breed approach has been a strategy born of necessity for service providers looking for an end-to-end solution to their back-office needs. Yet some service providers have been reluctant to disclose their partners.

"There seems to be a move afoot within the industry for providers to be close to the [vest] with whom they are using and what they are using them for," said Michael Allen, senior analyst for operations support systems at The Aberdeen Group. Some providers view their solutions as a competitive differentiatior.

"I don't understand that strategy. These vendors are making things happen for us," Parks said.

Other vendors helping NorthPoint include Compaq Computer, EMC, MetaSolv Software, Oracle and Sun Microsystems.

EMC will provide NorthPoint with 12 terabits of storage capacity at its new data center in Emeryville, Calif.; MetaSolv's telecom business solution will be used for network inventory management. Compaq and Sun will provide platforms for network management and other software solutions.

In addition, NorthPoint is using a loop pre-qualification system developed in-house to determine the level of service it can offer potential customers. The solution has improved NorthPoint's pre-qualification accuracy by 20%.

"It is an art form, not a science," Parks said. "But the more accurate you are up front, the less you disappoint the customer."

Mishandling consumer requests is another way to fail customers. To avoid a bottleneck in that process, NorthPoint concentrated on scalability when determining the final components of its OSS. The data competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) chose Siebel and Syndesis primarily for their scalability, Parks said. The new system replaced a previous solution from Eftia OSS Solutions. NorthPoint also added additional storage and server capacity.

"I'm not saying Eftia can't scale. It's been very productive until now. It's just the implementation we had wasn't going to scale for us," Parks said.

Starting and stopping implementations can be expensive, but in the long run, it will be worth it, Allen said. "I think it's a lot wiser for CLECs to go ahead and spend the money because from their point of view, the sky is the limit as far as customers. That means they can be faced with sudden demands that they would have a hard time meeting otherwise," Allen said.

NorthPoint is trying to meet that demand in the U.S. and in Europe with VersaPoint, a broadband service provider company formed earlier this month by NorthPoint and VersaTel Telecom International, a broadband provider in Germany.

NorthPoint also has a strategic partnership with Call-Net in Canada. The service delivery capabilities of NorthPoint's new back-office system will support initiatives introduced by NorthPoint during the past year, including content delivery, consumer-class asymmetrical DSL and voice-over-DSL services.

For more information about NorthPoint's business plan, see page 38.